What do you get when you cross.......?

**PLEASE READ THIS** for anyone looking at this model displayed in my showroom and wondering if I will sell it? PLEASE DON’T ASK!!! I get numerous requests from TC members wanting to buy cars displayed in my Tamiyaclub showroom, and to be honest I get very annoyed when people ask to buy something that is clearly NOT FOR SALE!! This car is part of MY COLLECTION and as such I want to KEEP IT!! So please don’t Email on the off chance that I might sell it to you, if I want to sell any of my cars I will put them up for sale in my TRADE ROOM, so look there to see what cars I am prepared to sell otherwise don’t bother asking cos the only answer you will get is NO!!! thanks for reading this disclaimer. Regards wldnas.

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You know how it is? ;) you just so happen to have a virtually complete chassis for a car, complete with fitted radio gear and fully operational yet it’s missing that key ingredient to making it a complete car… THE BODY!

We’ve all been there, and this car just so happens to be a car that is quite rare, and when you do see them for sale more often than not they are MIB kits, so finding spares is a complete nightmare, welcome to the world of Rare RC car collecting, collecting Tamiya’s is EASY, they are very popular, and sold by the thousands all over the world, so getting parts is pretty straight forward, even for some of the less popular vehicles (provided you have a suitably fat wallet ;) but for ppl like me who try to find ever more obscure and unusual cars, getting the spares needed to restore then is very difficult task, especially when the cars were never best sellers and in some cases only sold in a few isolated markets, like the USA or Japan.

What’s even harder is when the Car is made by a famous TOY manufacturer and just so happen to be the ONLY ready to assemble RC kit they EVER made, that just makes my job even harder, so when I acquired the chassis of a BANDAI Mad Wolf in a lot of cars I bought off a guy I met down the local RC club, my expectations of getting the parts I need to fully restore this car back to it’s intended original condition was always going to be a struggle, actually I also got a MIB MONOGRAM version of the Mad Wolf along with the chassis in this lot of cars, I was for a time toying with the idea of taking the body set from that kit (which is different to the Bandai one) and fitting it to this chassis to make a complete car without disturbing the rest of the kit.

But more recently a more daring plan had occurred to me ; ) the car was totally runnable and to be honest the chassis is excellent and the car drives extremely well, the handling is very supple and for a basic 540 car it’s pretty darn quick, so I decided to take it as a runner to the next Tamiya Drive event at Clumber park, planned for Sun Sep 21st 2003, but I could not take just a chassis to drive… OH-NO! I had to find and fit a body to it, so I had a rummage around to see what I had to hand, I did originally plan to use a pipe frame body as I have a spare Galaxy and Icarus frames to spare, but getting them to fit of the unusual monocoque chassis was quite tricky, so I turned my attentions to Truck bodies.

I have a Parma Blackfoot body available, but in order to make it fit properly I would have had to cut back the wheel arches quite a bit and the BF body is virtually mint so I was not prepared to do that, so what else could I use? Then I remembered that I had a manky old Bush Devil shell that originally came with that truck, it was in a dreadful state, painted metallic purple with random stickers sparsely placed over it, and all the usual cuts and tears including the Big’uns behind the cab which has split up both sides and was held together with some bits of cardboard that were stapled between the splits :S so it wouldn’t hurt to butcher this body for the cause now… would it ;)

So I set to work with the scissors cutting away the arches to match the slightly longer wheel base of the chassis, the old card and staples where removed and replaced with some thin squares of plasticard that were used to strengthen the insides of the body where the splits are, however I have re-used staples as the method of fixing, cos they are cheap, easy to apply and very effective at doing the job, if just a little unsightly :S but having arranged them evenly and slapped some thick paint over the top, who’s gonna notice ;) I decided on a simple Black and red colour scheme, I blacked out the windows and picked the frames out in silver, the old decals where removed (except the Head and tail lamp decals) and a load of new small sponsor decals applied.

The Bull and Roll bars where reworked slightly, fitted with new cover decals and two of the spot lamps were removed from the front and fitted on top of the roll bar, I had to resort to some artistic licence with the Bonnet and side slogans, so they were hand painted, with “WILD WOLF” on the sides and “RUNNING WILD!” on the bonnet, once the body was finished I had to arrange some body mounts, fortunately the chassis already had an extended mount on the front, I guess when the previous owner tried the same trick ;) the rear mount were done by using some spare mounts I had lying about, drilling some mounting holes in the chassis tub and fitting them in place, new holes in the shell had to be drilled and some are a little out of line and the body sits a little crooked as a result :S

But after all that work the result is quite striking :) now you allways have to have a name with these things, Hybrid cars like this especially so, now as the chassis was a kind of Wolf then I wanted to reflect that in the new name, I also was tempted to use the words of the Bush Devil in it to but all the name combinations I came up with sounded silly, so Wild Wolf it had to be, wild as it wheels on the chassis are the same size and dimentions as the wheels on the tamiya Wild One ;)

So next stop Clumber park, hope to see you there, for that is where you will see this ;)